Who is this blog for?

Originally, this blog is mainly for the students of the “Exploring Australian Speculative Fiction” Intermediate Module and Praxismodul. They edit and fill this blog together with their lecturers, currently Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila. However, we are happy to include other topics – either under a separate category (such as “Thoughts on Translation”) or in the general “Further Courses and Topics” area. It will be publicly available worldwide and some blog posts will be advertised on Twitter – you are of course very welcome to share this blog on Twitter yourself.

Who can contribute to this blog?

Essentially, any member of the HHU English and American Studies Department is allowed to blog! You need to register with the blogfarm (make sure to only get an account, not a blog – unless that’s something you want!) and then send an e-mail to Bettina.Burger@hhu.de or Lucas.Mattila@hhu.de, so we can add you to the blog contributors!

How do I register?

You can click “Registrieren” at the bottom of the blog pages – this should lead you to a page where you can get yourself a username as well as a blog. Choose only to get a username, then get in contact with us, so we can enable your posting abilities for this blog in particular.

Alternatively, you can head to the hhu blogfarm website (https://blogs.phil.hhu.de/) and choose “blog erstellen”, which will lead you to a page where you can say that you don’t actually want a blog but just an account!

What kind of content can I post?

You can post essays, reviews, opinion pieces or even art as long as it is related to Anglophone Literary Studies (posts on films and graphic novels are very welcome, too!). You could even record a video or a podcast, which we can embed – this requires a little more contact with us, the editors, though! Your content will be attributed to one of the categories (“Speculative Australia”, “Thoughts on Translation” or “Further Courses and Topics”) – if you think you need a category of your own (and are reasonably certain that yours won’t be the only post), you can contact us and we can make one!

One thing that you need be aware of, though, is copyright. Please make sure that your quotations do not exceed the acceptable limit of academic quotations and are properly cited (we prefer the MLA in-text citations here). If you want to decorate your blog post with any images, you have to make sure that they are copyright-free – you can check out pixabay.com, pexels.com or any other free use website that offers stock pictures!

I’m lecturer at HHU – what can I do with this blog?

You can write blog posts on your research interests if you’d like – you’d need to register as described above, than ask to be admitted to the contributors of this blog. If you want to use this blog as part of your teaching (say as a Praxismodul component or as part of your course tasks), please contact Lucas Mattila and Bettina Burger. We can make a new category with the name of your course and give you administrative rights so you can work with your students on this blog directly! We are very happy to have many different lecturers and students cooperate on this blog!

You can also just make your students aware of this opportunity and tell them to contact us themselves if you don’t want to make the blog an official feature of your course – if the number of students wanting to contribute remains reasonable, we can do some editing, but if you would like all your students or just a lot of your students to write here, we would ask you to do the pre-upload editing yourself!

I’m a student taking part in the Praxismodul part of “Exploring Australian Speculative Fiction” – what do I have to do with this blog?

Well, you will definitely have to write at least 3 blog posts throughout term as well as give feedback to your fellow students via the comments function. You will also have access to the ILIAS folder for this course, so you can ‘practice’ writing blog posts there and receive more detailed constructive criticism before you post here. You can write reviews on one of the many, many books or short stories on our primary literature bibliography or you can tackle a specific topic (queer theory? postcolonial fantasy? ecocriticism?) with a text of your choice. You can also record a video or podcast as well as add art/illustrations to your blog post. As a student in the Praxismodul, you will receive a whole term of guidance when it comes to blog writing, so don’t worry!

I’m a HHU student who is not taking part in the Praxismodul nor in any other course whose lecturer has decided to make use of this blog – but I’ve got this great idea for an article! What can I do?

You can write us an email, explain your idea, which we will then approve if possible. You then register as described above, tell us your e-mail address and account name, wait till you’ve got access to this blog and get posting. We would ask you, though, to send us a draft of your blog before uploading it so we can do some preliminary edits.